Monday, September 21, 2009

Some Hidden Camera Investigations Are Bigger Than Others

It's not all that unusual for a production staffer to goose a crowd with the intent to make a shot look good. And certainly, the people at that protest would have been inclined to cheer for a Fox News report anyway.

The Huffington Post has confirmed that the woman in the below video — seen raising her arms to rally the crowd behind Griff Jenkins, who was reporting from the scene for Fox News — is Fox News producer Heidi Noonan.

"The employee is a young, relatively inexperienced associate producer who realizes she made a mistake and has been disciplined," Bryan Boughton, Fox News Channel Washington Bureau Chief told the Huffington Post.

Just an inexperienced employee who made a mistake and was disciplined. It's not indicative of a large news organization and their hundreds of employees. Nothing to see here, everybody move along.

How is this at all different from the ACORN story?

(My point, if unclear, is not that everybody at Fox News is hopelessly corrupt and complicit at creating news events instead of reporting on them - that's just the province of top management - it's that they feel perfectly justified in blaming events on individual staffers and taking no responsibility, while not accepting the same stance from an organization with thousands of satellite offices like ACORN.)

...in the same vein - David Vitter complaining that criminal activity is the issue with ACORN, when he has pretty much admitted to his own criminal activity regarding prostitution, which is the same supposed sin "exposed" on those ACORN tapes.